Subjective Worlds
by wordsurfer
Summary: Alex is unconscious, but her spirit is wandering the halls of Hope Zion. Charlie doesn't take this well. AU of 2x08 "Defriender."


Alex stood in the corner of the crowded Hope Zion ER, with no memory of how she had gotten there. She put a hand to her head but there was no blood and she felt no pain, which ruled out a head injury. Any further self-assessment was cut short by two nurses rushing past her, almost close enough to knock her over.

Curious why they were in such a hurry, she followed them past patients with the usual burns, broken bones, and allergic reactions to a bed already surrounded by so many doctors that she couldn't see who lay there, let alone what their condition was. Stepping closer, she realized that both Joel and Charlie were in the center of the huddle.

"Charlie? Joel?" she asked loudly to get their attention. "What's going on?"

Joel made no indication that he had heard her, but Charlie froze and bowed his head, closing his eyes and letting out a heavy breath. Neither of them answered her, though, and none of the other doctors so much as looked her way.

"Charlie?" she asked again, finally stepping close enough to see who was lying on the bed. It was her own body, bloody and unresponsive, hooked up to a dozen machines as various doctors, nurses, and residents prepped her for surgery. She stumbled backwards at the sight, gasping, stomach churning, one hand covering her mouth.

"Okay, this is a dream, right?" she said aloud, half-hysterical. The only person who acknowledged her words was Charlie, who scrunched his face up as if he were in pain and jerked his head slightly. "This is some sort of bizarre nightmare brought on by too many night shifts and worrying about my speech for that damn conference and…" she trailed off as memory came flooding back.

The conference. Stopping at the gas station for directions and so that she could change. Walking into the store to find a twitchy kid holding Joel and the cashier at gunpoint. The kid swinging around as he heard the noise of the door opening behind him, instinctively pulling the trigger. The sharp blossom of pain in her belly. Feeling like she was moving in slow motion, underwater, as she fell to the ground, grasping feebly at the blood spreading across her purple blouse. Joel's face above hers, out of focus, shouting something she couldn't understand, then darkness.

Oh God. Was she dead? This didn't feel like Heaven. Hell, maybe, with her bloodstained body over there and no one able to hear her. Not that she even believed in an afterlife. So, a dream, then. Had to be. She'd fallen asleep while Joel drove, and any minute now she was going to feel the car slow down and she'd wake up and let him tease her about the weird ideas lurking in her subconscious. Right?

As she watched, her body was hurriedly transferred to a gurney, and rushed away down the hallway, accompanied by most of the medical professionals. Charlie and Joel remained behind, her fiancée clutching the hospital bed tightly as if it was the only thing keeping him upright. Joel didn't look much better.

The two men stared blankly at nothing for a minute. Finally, Charlie raised his head and told Joel, "I'm uh, I'm gonna…" He nodded with his head to the doors.

"Yeah, okay," Joel answered. "You want me to-"

"No, it's fine," Charlie cut him off. As he stumbled to the hallway, she could have sworn his eyes met hers, but he made no indication that he'd seen her.

Not knowing what else to do, she followed Charlie down the corridors of Hope Zion. She felt like a phantom, a ghost haunting the hospital's halls, invisible and unreal, with no way of interacting with the people around her.

To her surprise, Charlie didn't go to surgery or to the doctors' lounge, but instead ducked into a storage closet two hallways over. She followed him inside, confused, calling out his name again in the hope that he had actually been able to hear her before. The door finished closing before she had fully entered the room, and she shivered as she watched it pass through her insubstantial body.

The lights had turned on automatically when he had opened the door, so it was easy for her to find him huddled on the floor, his back against the wall, behind a shelf full of bed linens. His face was pressed to his hands, with his elbows digging into his knees, but she could see his shoulders shaking, and could hear his whispered, broken repetition, "No, no, no, no, no. This isn't happening. This isn't happening."

"Charlie?" she whispered hesitantly as she crouched down in front of him, causing him to still. Her heart seized as he looked up at her, tears still streaming down his face.

"You can see me?" she asked him, just to make sure.

The laugh she got in response was just on the near side of hysteria. "I don't know," he answered. "God, I don't know."

She didn't know what to say to that, so instead she asked the next most pressing question on her mind. "Am I dead?"

"No," he answered immediately. "No, you're not. You've lost a lot of blood and you're in surgery but they're pretty sure you're going to be fine. So that means that either you're unconscious and your spirit is wandering around the hospital, or I'm hallucinating and now's a _really_ bad time for that." He punctuated his last sentence by slamming his palm viciously against his forehead.

"Stop it!" she told him sharply, reaching out to pull his hands away, and growling in dismay when they passed right through his body. He lowered his hands anyway, only to punch the floor. She drew back at his bitter laugh.

"Like I said. Hallucination."

Alex shook her head. "If anyone's hallucinating, it's me. I just watched a bunch of doctors wheel away my body for surgery, and now I'm sitting in a storage closet with my fiancée, who seems to be the only person in the world who can see or hear me right now, as we both freak out."

She broke off abruptly, realizing that her tone had crossed the threshold into hysteria. He didn't respond, though, just stared at her blankly. "What?" she said defensively.

"No, nothing," he said, snapping his attention back. "It's just, if I really was hallucinating, I don't think this is how I would imagine you."

In spite of how scared she was, she couldn't help being amused by the implications of that. "I don't think now is a good time to be discussing your fantasies," she pointed out.

He smiled a little at that, calming. "You know what I meant. How about we go with this is all very real? You're really here and I'm really seeing you."

"Okay. Then I'd have to ask why it is that you're the only one here who can see me? Is it some sort of weird magical fiancée thing? Like, because we're going to be married you can see my true spirit? Because I'd have thought I'd have heard about that sort of thing before now."

"Ah. No," he said. "This doesn't happen to most people, and you're not the only spirit I can see." He sighed. "It's been like this since I was in the coma. I was walking around then like you are now, and the only people I could talk to were other people like me—unconscious or dead. But I watched you sit by my bedside and talk to me every day, and I wished that I could hold you and tell you I was right there, but I couldn't."

"And then I woke up. And I thought things were going to be okay, that it had all been some sort of weirdly realistic dream, but then I kept seeing the ghosts. And I knew there must still something wrong with me."

"But if it really was all in my head, how could I explain… they tell me things, sometimes. Things that I couldn't know, otherwise. So I knew that it was Maggie's father in the morgue, and I knew how he died. And remember Russell Burke, the malpractice lawyer? I knew something was wrong during the surgery because I watched his ghost fall to the ground paralyzed."

Alex stared at him in shock, a hundred questions spinning around her head. "Why didn't you tell me?" she demanded.

"How could I? What would you have thought if I had? That I was brain-damaged from the accident? Crazy? Hallucinating? Would you have gone to Dr. Murphy and told him you thought there was something wrong with me, gotten me locked away in the psych ward? If this wasn't happening to you right now, is there even a chance that you would ever have believed me?" His voice was wild and shaking by the end.

"Charlie…." She couldn't bring herself to deny it.

"It's okay. I don't even know if I believe it myself." He continued, quieter, "God, some of the time I don't even believe I've actually woken up. I couldn't burden you with this."

"You're right," she admitted. "I probably would have thought it was some sort of after-effect of the coma. But what's happening to me right now? It's real. I don't know how, but it is. You don't have to hide this from me anymore. You don't have to be alone."

Once again, the twisted smile flashed on his face. "I wish that was true," he swore. "But you won't remember any of this when you wake up. No one ever does."

"You did," she pointed out.

"I'm special, apparently," he said dryly. "I'd say it was my open-mindedness and spirituality, except, well, you know me."

She grinned at him. "Yeah, I do."

"You know, maybe it's a car accident thing?" he said thoughtfully. "The only other person I've met who remembers is Randall, and it was the same for him. Although…"

"Wait, Randall? You mean the Great Randall? The phony psychic?" she exclaimed, interrupting him.

"Yeah," he sighed. "Not so phony. Just kinda greedy at the time. I really did talk to him when I was in my coma."

"That bastard!" she exclaimed.

"It's been hard on him," Charlie said, placating. "Even worse than for me, because he sees the ghosts everywhere. I just see them here at the hospital." He paused. "So far, anyway."

"You think it's going to get worse?"

"I don't know." He massaged his forehead. "I get the feeling that it might. Lately, I've been seeing things out of the corner of my eye when I'm driving or getting groceries or at a movie. They're gone when I turn my head, but every time I think I get closer to catching them."

He sounded so tired, so despairing. She ached to hold him, to assure him that everything would be all right. "Oh, Charlie," she murmured.

"It destroyed his life," Charlie said quietly. "And I know how he feels."

"But it can be different for you," she argued. "You said you've used it to save people. Maybe that's what you're meant to do with it. You're a doctor. Maybe it's a gift."

"For now," he agreed. "But the line between the living and the dead is blurring. There are already times when I don't realize that the person I'm talking to is a ghost until they disappear. Some time soon, I'm worried I'm going to lose track and I'll end up stuck in some in-between place."

"I won't let that happen."

"There's nothing you can do to stop it."

"Maybe not. But I _love_ you, Charlie. Just focus on that. Let my love hold you here. Ground you. Cling to it when you're feeling lost. Because it will never go away."

"I'll try," he whispered. "God, I'll try Alex. But I can't make you any promises."

She nodded and smiled. "That's good enough for me. Because I know that Charlie Harris is a stubborn bastard, and if he really wants something he won't let anything get in his way."

He said something in reply, but she couldn't hear it over the beeping of monitors which suddenly filled the air. Her fiancée gave no indication that he could hear them, or feel the sharp but invisible force now trying to pull her backwards.

"I think I'm waking up, Charlie," she said.

His eyes filled with tears, and he nodded.

"Hey," she said gently. "Even if I don't remember, you will. Remember that I understand, Charlie. I forgive you for pulling away from me. But promise me that you'll stop now. Promise you'll let me help you."

"I promise," he whispered. "I'll see you when you wake up."

"I love you."

"Love you too," was the last thing she heard before she slipped backwards into darkness.

* * *

><p>Alex floated back to awareness slowly, disoriented, unable to feel most of her lower body. She thought she'd been having a dream; she remembered a supply closet and Charlie, although they hadn't been doing what they normally did in supply closets…<p>

Speaking of Charlie. He was sitting in a hospital chair next to her bed, looking utterly drained and she could see tear tracks on his face, but he managed to conjure up a smile when she opened her eyes and turned her head a little.

"Hey," he said warmly.

"Hey," she breathed. Her lips were dry and she was so thirsty, and there was a cup of ice chips on the table beside her bed but she couldn't quite muster up the energy to reach for it. Seeing her longing look, Charlie quickly got up and brought the cup over, helping her swallow a few chips. She sighed gratefully.

"What happened?" she asked as he returned the Styrofoam cup to the table.

"What's the last thing you remember?" There was an odd look of anticipation on his face, and the question made him tense, maybe even scared, although she couldn't fathom why.

"Joel and I were on the way to the conference. We were lost, and he didn't want to ask for directions but he pulled in to a gas station for me. And then…" she frowned.

"And then you were lucky enough to get caught up in an amateur robbery," he told her. "The kid shot you in the abdomen. Didn't penetrate the abdominal cavity, thank God, but it took hours for an ambulance to get there. You lost a lot of blood, although not nearly as much as you could have thanks to Joel—you probably owe him your life, by the way—and you've just come out of surgery. You're going to be fine, though. A few weeks of rest, and you'll be on your feet again, no problem. Luke has already promised to make _barrels_ of chicken soup."

He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes, which were dark with a grief she couldn't understand.

"You do realize this means we're never getting rid of him," she pointed out lightly, wanting to erase his sadness.

Obligingly, Charlie groaned theatrically and sank down onto the bed beside her. "Oh God!"

She grinned. "It won't be so bad! He may even wear pants sometimes."

"Now there's a memory I never wanted to revisit. Thanks," he said with a grimace.

"S'what I'm here for," she answered, and stretched out a hand to rest on his leg. He cupped her hand with both of his own and held on tightly.

"Hey," she said, squeezing back. "I'm here. I'm okay."

"I know," he answered, but the sadness still lingered in his eyes.

They were both silent for a while, just enjoying each other's presence, until Charlie spoke again. "Alex," he said hesitantly. "I made you a promise while you were unconscious. You don't remember it, but…"

"What?" she prompted when he trailed off.

"There's something I need to tell you. Just promise me you'll listen until the end before you say anything."

"Okay," she agreed cautiously, wondering why he was looking scared again.

"Okay," he echoed. He closed his eyes, cleared his throat, and began.


End file.
